Archiving the Obscene: Erotica and Censorship in Mexico, 1700–1955

The paper traces a “genealogy of the obscene” in Mexico, analyzing how the popular circulation of “immoral” erotic imagery in the late colonial past shares much in common with the early twentieth-century clandestine production and distribution of photographic and filmic pornography. I focus, first, on the period of the Bourbon Reforms, from 1700-1821, when several the Holy Office of the Mexican Inquisition censored and confiscated “obscene” etchings, drawings, statues, and paintings, and sought to punish those who produced and circulated them. Using a handful of Inquisition trials, I analyze popular forms of circulation alongside the so-called “absent archive” of pornography from the late colonial period. I then shift to the early twentieth-century criminal trials of a Spanish bookdealer living in Mexico City, Amadeo Pérez Mendoza, who founded a clandestine empire of the production and sale of “artistic men’s magazine,” erotic prints, and pornographic film screenings. The paper looks at the archival impulses of the Inquisition branch of Mexico’s national archive, the Archivo General de la Nación, as well as the Filmoteca de la UNAM, one of the most important film archives in Latin America, that houses an invaluable collection of Latin American stag films, many of which are queer in their content. Connecting these archival initiatives, I conclude by exploring my own collaborative work with a Mexico City-based queer archival collective, Archivo El Insulto, to recover, restore, and digitally archive early twentieth-century “obscene” films and photography as historical documents that offer windows into the politics of religion, morality, and the body.